The owner of my buisiness cornered me at our Christmas party “I want to ship you off to Hawaii till it gets warm, then you can come back”. It’s good to be loved and I dare say having a place to warm my frozen bones all the while being surrounded by happy people is a pretty good option these days. Although… its kind of like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

I never know what to say in these conversations, I work so hard at being unemployable, hell I can’t even commit to tomorrow let alone the rest of the year. My maintenance log is a matrix of concentric rings, almost every item that has topped the list somehow slips to the middle before taking its high ranking position at the bottom.

What can I sell, what should I keep. How do I spend, where can I cut costs both today and tomorrow. How much do I earn and how much can I save, it’s a rollercoaster, often one step forward and two, steps back. Some days I swear I’m just going to keep her as a day sailor and go buy some really good food instead of bronze, stainless and teak.

If you’ve never heard voices from the sea it’s because you’ve never been out there, alone with nothing and everything filling every gap of you sanctity. When the wind hits just right you hear words clear as day. Not the words you hear in your head, these are real, real voices and they speak to you. Thousands of years of sea faring souls converge in one tiny body of water that connects 71.8 percent of the planet and holds 80% of its life force.

I could hear them tonight in many forms. A good friend sent me a writing piece almost identical to a piece i am writing for one of those Big Bang, flash yachting rags. The kind that suggest you just cut the lines and go on one page and have full page adds of a tidal wave crushing your boat on the next with and add for a life saving this or that. Below are my words, the essay has been deleted, he is a far better writer than I will ever be.

The waves are higher now, higher than my cockpit, higher than my head, higher than the roof that covered the brick house I grew up in. Deep blue with pure white horses tumbling down their faces. The boat dips and I drag my fingers across the surface and lean with the boat, were surfing. A small ship on the sea is as close as you will ever come to walking on water. This experience was first learned on a surfboard at Rincon, my childhood stomping grounds. Big waves are fun, they are life and power and they will set you fee.

You can never gain this experience from the deck of a large ship, you are just an observer but from the deck of a small ship you are a participant. My favorite thing is to watch the gulls in heavy weather, gliding and dipping just over the crest of the waves that thrown me around like a rag doll. They touch the water, so small yet they float over the massive wave without even noticing. The gull has many lessons to teach us if we can only slow down long enough to observe their games.

It’s rapidly becoming apperant that my current trajectory is way off course. I need a new perspective, to see my goals from a different angle, to reassess again, adjust my sails and steer a true course.